Cover Story
The decline in eurozone prices is the most dramatic example of deflationary pressures afflicting the globe. All eyes are now on European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi and his efforts to reverse that trend.

It is essential for companies to work with banking partners they know they can trust. Global Finance’s annual ranking of World’s Safest Banks have been the recognized and trusted standard of financial counterparty safety for more than 20 years.

Global SalonGlobal Finance sat down recently with Andrew Spindler, president and CEO of the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, which has spread the gospel of sound financial systems to the developing world for the better part of a quarter of a century.

This year, we updated the name of the awards to reflect the extent to which digitization is transforming our lives in general and banking in particular. By renaming this as the Digital Bank Awards, we are making the competition more inclusive of current technology and more future-focused in anticipation of developments still to come.

Emerging Markets Roundup: Middle East

Advertisement

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the kingdom’s central bank, issued new regulations governing the enforcement of foreclosures as part of a new mortgage law that has been debated for years.

The law could boost residential lending to about $32 billion a year, according to Capitas Group International, which develops financial platforms and oversees real estate investments.

Over the next 10 years, spending on housing in Saudi Arabia will total $346 billion, according to a new study by National Commercial Bank (NCB). Some 2.4 million new housing units will be built, easing the country’s housing shortage. An increasing number of young people with rising incomes are creating significant demand, the bank says.

Meanwhile, NCB Capital has become the first Saudi wealth manager to establish a shariah-compliant funds platform in Ireland under the European regulatory framework UCITS. The bank will offer a fund that invests in Saudi Arabian equities and another that invests in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets. NCB plans to market the funds internationally.

Elsewhere in the GCC, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are seeking to purchase up to $7.6 billion of missile defense systems from Lockheed Martin. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency in the US, which oversees foreign arms sales, approved the potential transactions. The Pentagon also announced that Saudi Arabia plans to buy $6.7 billion of C-130 military transport planes and refueling aircraft from Lockheed Martin. It said the kingdom needs the planes to “sustain its aging fleet.”